A New Visual Vocabulary

Akshay Mahajan

Photography in India has long been left on the sidelines. What it requires is the emergence of a younger generation with its own readings, modes of engagement and surfeit of results. This is why I was excited when the opportunity to work on the debut issue of PIX came about. During the selection process I was drawn to particular bodies of work which presented a fresh visual vocabulary. I felt they understood the theme “Suburbia” in a deeply explicit way and meticulously articulated it in a manner that went beyond cliché. It was interesting to observe many of the practitioners in this issue asking, what needs to be recorded and preserved for our personal and collective memory?

We are proud to present some of these new exciting visual perspectives. I feel that photography may yet come to represent a long-standing practice in India, as its carefully studied oral traditions have been. In this regard family histories, social change and detailed human recollections have gradually been supplanted by photographs, and hopefully PIX comprises a piece in that complex puzzle of creating an unrestrained picture of our times.